On Thu, May 16, 2002 at 02:09:16AM -0700, Patrick Beart wrote: > Folks: > > I keep seeing references in some Linux texts that have > parenthetical numbers behind them. In the book "DNS and Bind" > (O'Reilly publishers) there's a reference to "hostname(1)" that is > driving me CRAZY! > > I have pretty much figured out that such things refer to "man > pages" and I know what those are (I'm new to Linux, but not stupid!). > However, I'm stumped at the parenthetical reference. What the blazes > is THIS? Is it a paragraph description? ... a section? ... or?? > I tried "man hostname" and read the entire (short) > description. Nowhere was the "(1)" used. Moreover, trying "man > hostname(1)" throws an error. What gives?
The unix man page system is divided into sections, to make it easy to group related man pages together. The number in pathenthesis is the section number. Sometimes, there might be a binary command in the system, as well a library call with the same name, and their man pages will be in different sections. As an example, type: man 1 printf and man 3 printf and see what you get. If there is more than one man page with the same name, as above, then by default, the first one found will be displayed. So "man printf" will be the same as "man 1 printf". If you want to see how the man pages are physically organised on the file system, look in /usr/share/man. Hope this helps. -- Anand Buddhdev Personal site: http://anand.org _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
